I’ve never eaten at a Hooters restaurant, but the chain’s big-eyed owl logo has seeped into my consciousness, and somehow I know exactly what a Hooters girl looks like.
And now she’s walking the aisles on Hooters Air 737s.
Just don’t ask her to bring you a soda or find the emergency flotation device. She’s more an ornament than a flight attendant. Or so I discovered recently on a Hooters flight from Newark, N.J., to Myrtle Beach, S.C., taken just to try the new airline.
At a time of financial turmoil among most major carriers, concerns about safety and a paranoid sense of political correctness, I find it hard to believe that anyone would start an airline with the single distinction of pretty girls in too-tight tops. The bad old days when stewardesses were the stuff of heated male fantasies are long gone, aren’t they? Apparently not, if you’re headed from Atlanta or Newark to Myrtle Beach on Hooters Air.
I watched people arriving from Myrtle Beach on Hooters Air before my departure, a perfectly average group of passengers who didn’t look as though they had just flown in from Sodom or Gomorrah.
The Hooters plane I boarded was sparkling clean. The flight attendants, middle-aged women in modest navy blue suits, told me I could sit anywhere because there were only eight passengers. Only after we were well under way did I spot a Hooters girl.
She and her colleague looked enough alike to be cousins who had both made the cheerleading squad. They were covered from neck to heel in orange track suits, showing less flesh than a librarian.
We know the duties of pilots and flight attendants, but the job of a Hooters Air girl is harder to pin down. On my flight, they halfheartedly hawked Hooters T-shirts, ran a brief trivia contest and dozed in the row of seats behind me.
“We’re there for entertainment,” says Jessica Powell, a 20-year-old Hooters girl who is also a substitute middle school teacher during the day.
There’s no harm in it, I guess. Like the restaurants, the airline is all good, clean fun, made of sauteed chicken parts and sexual longing. Maybe Hooters helps men work off angst and insecurity. Maybe Hooters girls will earn enough money to go to medical school.
